Monthly Report - June 2017

Here comes a report for June with new categorized charts for better understanding hours I've invested in. This month packs with activities and couple of released projects.

Total hours spent

Summary

This month packs with quite activities and releasing of a couple of projects. There are lots of tasks I can categorize. This makes me shift the way creating hours-spent chart in this report. You will see Big picture, and Projects charts.

Big picture mainly contains the following things

programming - all about technical implementation in code

visual - all about drawing, coloring, making logos, and anything that involve artistic stuff

music

research

writing - mainly about when I write a new blog post

misc - other stuff that cannot be categorized above

Above list is mandatory, and somewhat fixed that I tend not to change in the future. I got inspiration to base off categorizing like that from Devine. Classify each task like what I did previously is easier when there're not too many tasks, but when there's many, I really have a hard time and it requires me too much time to think about it.

Projects will now better categorized into one bigger project/task, and not spread for too many, it should be easier to grasp. It will be better over time.

Block Bunny

CIGA Game Jam 2017 - Race Plant

I participated in CIGA Game Jam 2017 with other fellows Chinese game developers here in Shenzhen as well. It's the first time of game jam activity here in China I participated.

I made Race Plant solo in 48 hours. The process involves me to quickly fasten the process in learning how to make pixel art. It helped a lot! To be honest, this is the first major time I really make art myself. I'm quite satisfied with the result I got.

The strategy I approached is to find reference both in color pallete, and end result you want to achieve from Twitter, or Internet. Then at first try to make your own as good as that reference. But if it's not it's ok because you got a good reference point to quickly start off.

This process makes me diss GIMP and completely do pixel art in Aseprite from now on. It's great software, and you should check it out.

Also I published Race Plant on itch.io with pay as you want model. I open sourced the project with respective license with limit in some ways on Github too with donation model in compensate that you might learn something from the project.

OMO

OMO is a puzzle game originally by ForeignGuyMike in which it's a great learning resource thus I went through on top to make changes and add improvements. You can check the project out on Github.

Ohh but not just changes and improvement, I noted key notes regarding to libgdx and kotlin that the project makes use too. Check it out on the link above.

Yup, you can see what changed and improved on link above. Feel free to do anything with the project, but be aware that ForeignGuyMike already published this original idea on Google Play thus you just cannot copy the code and reskin or slightly modify then publish. Do the real work, adapt, change to not make it completely rip-off, then you will have a chance to publish.

Main notable change is smooth and flexible drag-touch to select and deselect tiles.

Saved high scores has been added to the project

Smooth and flexible drag-touch to select and deselect tiles

It's technically done, just left with music and sfx in which I decided to learn how to make chiptune music first before call it complete.

Server

I did take some times to create a notifier which is based on NodeJS to send alert message to slack group whenever certain process died on server. I'm tired to know it long after HTTP process died, and I cannot access my website. Thus this notifier will bombard the message until you see and fix the problem :P

Bot game on point. Prepare to set up alerter when certain critical process crashed silently, then alert me. What if alerter crashes 2?👨🏽‍💻 pic.twitter.com/6eymFeBLLl

Techcrunch Shenzhen 2017

I attended Techcrunch Shenzhen 2017 event and captured what Edith Yeung said during panel along the line of difference of doing business between Eastern and Western that the former tends to quickly form partnership, and collaborate but latter tend to check the legitimate & background for another party before forming a thing. That's exactly what I've felt personally too even though not only in highly business sense.

This leads me to think about game dev ecosystem here in China especially Shenzhen (I think it applies to all area in China). Chinese game development ecosystem is very friendly and supportive. Everyone would like to help each other out. I think this trait is very natural in Chinese way of doing business as well. People here tend to collaborate, eager to seek to find partnership and my sense tells me that it'd be easy to close the deal if both side agrees.

I suggest you to sign up or attend events hosted by HAX too in you're into hardware stuff and especially if you base in Shenzhen. They will get freebies like free tickets to event i.e. Techcrunch, funding your hardware-based startup, meetups, etc.

VISA, Work Permit, and Residential Permit

Pheww! Early of June, I've done all of these and acquired all of them. Quite a long haul process spanning into 5-6 months included the time from registering a business license, going back to my own country (Thailand) to get all legal required documents, prepare all documents, commute to government places to handle stuff with help from agency etc. I don't think I will have time to pay attention to all the detail, so it's better to have agency takes care of stuff and you just do your best to help them from your side. If you want help regarding these, I can refer you to my trust agency to take care these stuff for you, just message me on Twitter.

But that's not all yet.....???

As of now, I'm in the process of waiting for bank confirmation to complete the process of acquiring company bank account. It's almost there I think after waiting for a month, that's a usual time for waiting anyway. So all process to get company license, VISA, work permit, residential permit, and bank account might take ~6 months to complete. If you plan the time carefully, it might be shorter too.

Chiptune Music

Ohh, I love this part. As stated from OMO, I decided to firstly learn how to make chiptune music first before calling a day for that project.
I'm in the process of doing that right now, and so far so good.

Right now I'm mainly using MiklyTracker. I will update on this skill development later in next month.

That's it for this month report.

If you have a chance to check out any project above, feel free to let me know what you think. Or if you have any suggestion, I love discussion and receive feedback, hit them up via comment section down below.

I blog about projects I'm working on. Mostly about mobile games, tech, web service, little tiny things I built for myself or for public, and tech/game industry-wide. Currently I'm living in Shenzhen, China. I'm running a small creative company with my girlfriend here.